| Tuesday, April 15, 2003 |
15:34 - Raising the bar
http://www.nationalpost.ca/world/story.html?id=ECE98D7D-B287-47A5-90FB-A76063AD1B4E
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It's now a war crime to use any weapon on the battlefield that is less technologically advanced than the most insanely modern and precise wizard weapons in our arsenal. Anything that can kill a civilian as well as it can a military target is hereby deemed evil.
People who had volunteered as Saddam's "human shields" will be among those contributing testimony. "Any evidence we can get hold of, we will present," Mr. Shiner said. "The [ICC] prosecutor would have a duty to investigate if there was credible evidence."
Mr. Shiner said the activists' case will probe the coalition's use, or suspected use, of cluster bombs, depleted uranium ammunition and fuel-air explosives.
These weapons are unauthorized, he claimed, because they "can't distinguish between civilian or military" targets.
Mark my words-- the moment we develop "morality bombs", which can kill those with evil thoughts but bounce right off the pure of heart, it will become a crime against humanity to use any weapon other than those during a war.
Regardless of, you know, intent. In all this war-crimes folderol, why is it that nobody is even approaching the most obvious of all factors involved in the deaths of civilians-- whether the party doing the killing intended civilians to die or not?
Without that crucial bit of testimony, which in the non-military world has given us such distinctions as "manslaughter" and degrees of murder, it becomes morally equivalent for us to accidentally wound a kid while firing on an advancing T-72 or while defending a checkpoint against cars accelerating through the cordon, and for Saddam's thugs to torture that same kid in a children's prison or to drop mustard gas on his house or to hide weapons in his school.
The guys crying "war crimes!" either are deliberately ignoring this distinction, or are too dense and blinded by their own hatred to understand it.
(Via Bill Herbert.)
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